President Barack Obama announced trade action against
China while in Cincinnati yesterday. Obama said his team had filed a
lawsuit at the World Trade Organization on the claim China is
cheating in auto trade by offering “extensive subsidies” to its
automakers and auto-part producers. China fired back with its own
lawsuit for U.S. tariffs that raise the price on a variety of Chinese
products — from steels to tires. Anti-China rhetoric has fast become the
latest flavor of the month for the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns, and
China is not happy with it.

But the presidential race raced back to gaffes over trade policy when Mother Jones
posted amazingly candid footage of Romney speaking to millionaires at a
fundraiser. In the videos, Romney straightforwardly outlines campaign
strategy. In one video, Romney said he doesn’t care about getting the
vote of the 47 percent of Americans that don’t pay taxes because he
doesn’t believe he can convince them to “take personal responsibility
and care for their lives.” The Obama team retaliated in a statement:
“It's shocking that a candidate for president of the United States would
go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that
half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to
handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their
lives. It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve
disdainfully written off half the nation.”

Ohioans love their local schools, a new survey shows. The
survey also found Ohioans trust their local school boards of education
with education-related decisions, but they really don’t trust the state
superintendent, governor or legislature.

Hamilton County courts want to go paperless. The move would save money and space and make the system more efficient.

County budget meetings are still chugging along. Different
department directors are still pleading for no cuts, but the
commissioners insist cuts have to be made somewhere.

Cincinnati police announced a new Taser policy. The new policy
disallows the use of frontal shots except in situations involving
self-defense and the defense of others, reinforces the fact officers
need to make sure such force is necessary and points out people have
been injured due to Taser use. The new policy was brought about due to
findings Taser use can kill in rare situations.

The streetcar’s yearlong delay got an explanation
yesterday. A few issues are to blame, including the city’s ongoing
conflict with Duke Energy over who has to pay for moving utility lines
to accommodate for the streetcar.

The amount of people on Ohio’s death row is shrinking.
After Donald Palmer’s execution, Ohio will drop to its lowest death row
population since July 1995.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted launched a mailing
campaign to clean up voter rolls. Using data from U.S. Postal Service
National Change of Address Registry, Husted mailed 70,000 former Ohioans
encouraging them to cancel their voter registration. The action is a
lot tamer than Republican-led efforts to purge voter rolls in other
states, which states like Florida, Iowa and Colorado have backed out of —
at least for now.

Ohio Rep. Connie Pillich of Cincinnati criticized the
University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees for former UC President Greg
Williams’ severance package. She told The Enquirer, “It’s
really disappointing that the trustees would make such a decision while
so many students and families are struggling with rising tuition costs.
As the trustees vote to needlessly spend over a million dollars, the
University is trying to decide how to fund $10 million for the
Cintrifuse project and students are taking out more loans to pay a
tuition that was increased by 3.5 percent this year.” Williams got a
package totaling $1.3 million after abruptly leaving the university,
citing personal reasons. Despite the allegedly rocky past between the
Board and Williams, the Board of Trustees insists it did not force him
out.

Eligible residents could save $163 a year with natural gas thanks to a new aggregation program in Cincinnati.
The city announced Friday it's working on the new plan with Duke
Energy, and customers should get details about the deal soon. The city
says the deal will reach about 64,000 residents and small businesses.

In case you missed it, the streetcar has been delayed to 2015. The city is now looking
for consultants to help manage the project with CAF USA, the city’s
preferred car manufacturer. The first phase of the streetcar will span
the Banks and Findlay Market. The city is also trying to study a
connection to the University of Cincinnati, Uptown’s hospitals and the
Cincinnati Zoo.

There is a lot of criticism being hurled at public charter
schools. While some charter schools are successful, some have serious
financial and educational problems. Critics say the schools need tougher
standards.

Romney is facing criticism for saying middle income is
$200,000 to $250,000 and less. However, Obama made a similar distinction
in the past when he said income up to $250,000 is middle class. The
reason for this strange distinction from both sides — most Americans
would find $250,000 to be beyond middle class — is to protect small
businesses. Typically, politicians try to bundle up small businesses
with middle class protections, and taxing income between $200,000 and
$250,000 as if it’s not middle class could potentially hurt small
businesses.

Carbon dioxide emissions fell to a 20-year low this year,
largely thanks to natural gas that was made cheaper and more plentiful
due to the fracking boom in Ohio and other states. The news is a
surprising turnaround for climate change activists, but critics
worry that methane — a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — emitted from natural gas operations could still pose a significant climate
threat. Environmental groups are generally opposed to fracking,
but supporters, like Gov. John Kasich, insist it can be made safe with
enough regulations. CityBeat previously covered the concerns and questions behind fracking here.

The Ohio Department of Education has had a rough year, and
in a few ways, it’s back to square one. On top of the search for a new
superintendent of public instruction, the Department of Education has
had to deal with budget cuts and layoffs, a new Board of Education
member with no college degree or known resume, and the department is now
being investigated by the state auditor.

The White House has announced a $30 million manufacturing
hub for Ohio that will act as a model for the rest of the United States.
The hub will bring together universities and businesses in order to increase growth and collaboration and decrease risk.

Ohio has seen an uptick of businesses requesting to work
in the state, according to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Estimates
show 6,137 new entities applied to work in the state during July, up
from 5,472 during July 2011. The state has also seen 52,728
new business requests so far in 2012, up from 49,460 during the same
January-to-July period in 2011. The news shows some signs of
strengthening economic growth in Ohio.

But Ohio’s unemployment rate barely moved in July. The
unemployment rate remained at 7.2 percent, the same as June’s
unemployment rate, even though 2,000 jobs were added.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. EPA,
Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and energy companies met yesterday
to work out how Ohio will enforce new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.
The new standards will greatly reduce toxic pollutants given off by
power plants, according to the National Resources Defense Council.

Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor claims there’s a funding
shortage for courts. The shortage could make it difficult for some cases
and people to see their day in the courtroom.

Fifty-eight state Republican lawmakers have never broken from the very conservative Ohio Chamber of Commerce in a vote.

Sen. Rob Portman will be speaking at the Republican
national convention. The convention will make Mitt Romney’s nomination
as the Republican presidential candidate official. Conventions are also a
time for political parties to show off their new party platforms.

President Barack Obama is coming back to Ohio next Tuesday. The president will be staying in Columbus this time around.

The big news this morning is President Obama’s State of the Union address, which revealed an assertive, populist side to B-Rock that’s largely been missing during the first three years of his term.

Will Obama keep his promises to go after Wall Street excesses and reckless financial firms, or is it mere election year posturing like apparently many of his statements in 2008 were? Only time will tell.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• I was at UPI in London during the 1963 March on
Washington. I read about it in London dailies and the Paris
Herald-Tribune. Since then, all kinds of “marches” on Washington have
cheapened the brand. So has the obsessive replaying of snippets from
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as if it were the event. I’m grateful to
news media that went further in recalling the magnitude of the 1963
march and roles played by organizers and other speakers. This was part
of the 1960s that I missed.

• Court rulings allow the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
heir to own and control his “I Have a Dream” speech to the 1963 march.
Anyone wanting to use more than a few words must pay. My first reaction
was “WTF? It was a public event in a public place and a public speech to
the public. That can be ‘owned’? Yup.

• Stenographic reporting of the so-called debate over
whether to bomb Syria back into the Stone Age helps build acceptance for
a new war. Similarly, assertions that Assad’s forces gassed civilians
are repeatedly reported as evidence or proof.

As of this writing, reporters have quoted no top Obama
administration official willing to offer evidence or proof. Instead, as
evidence, we have unverified videos online and interpretations of what
the images show. Reporters don’t tell us who provided death figures or
who provided information that White House is using the claim Sarin gas
was used.

• Meanwhile, the constitutional expectation that only
Congress can declare war has suffered the same fate as the Fourth
Amendment ban on unreasonable seizures and searches; dying if not dead.

Germany and Japan attacked us. Congress responded for the
most recent time: 1942. Russia’s surrogate attacked our dictator across
the 38th Parallel in 1950 and triggered the still-unresolved Korean
police action. LBJ was conned or knowingly lied about reported 1964
attacks on American warships in the Tonkin Gulf and moved us into the
undeclared Vietnam War. Luckily, Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in1990
and started Gulf War I. The CIA’s totally mistaken 2002 “slam dunk”
assurance about Weapons of Mass Destruction was used by Bush to justify
undeclared Gulf War II. After 9/11, Afghans sheltered Osama bin Laden
before our allies in Pakistan sheltered him and that was used to justify
our unfinished and undeclared war against the Taliban in both countries
although the Taliban never attacked us. Let’s not even get into the
invasion of Panama or Grenada or fiasco in Somalia. All that’s missing
in this latest rush to bash a hornets nest is a repeat of the New York
Times sycophantic reporting that Saddam Hussein had and would use
weapons of mass destruction.

• If you want a weapon of mass destruction, how about the
AK-47, the totemic Soviet assault rifle that is ubiquitous on every
continent or the simple machete/panga with which millions have been and
are being murdered and/or mutilated. No chemical, biological or nuclear
weapon has killed so many people.

• When will some national reporter ask, “What’s surgical
about a surgical strike?” Nothing unless we’re comparing it to carpet
bombing a la Germany, Japan, Laos or Vietnam.

Other than assassinating Assad with a drone-launched
guided missile — good enough for Americans in Yemen — any attack on
Syria will create “collateral” damage. They used to be called innocent
victims, sort of like French civilians killed by Allies’ D-Day bombing.

However, it’s no mystery why news media are willing, even
eager to echo this desensitizing insider language. It recalls “RPG,”
“IED,” “smart bombs,” “boots on the ground” and similar military
language embraced by civilian reporters for their civilian audiences.
Except those buzz words weren’t for civilian audiences; it was how
reporters assured military sources that journalists were savvy and
sympathetic listeners.

“Surgical strikes” serves us as badly as reporting
unsupported assertions and assumptions as fact. Accurately reported
bullshit is still bullshit.

• Accurate reporting requires context. Why is gassing
hundreds of Syrian civilians in Damascus worse than shooting and killing
as many or more civilians about in and around Cairo? Why is the killing
and wounding of thousands in Cairo worse than endlessly raping,
wounding, mutilating and killing millions of civilians in the horribly
misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo?

• Our selective condemnation of poison gas recalls the
11th-century papal ban of the cross bow; peasant crossbowmen could kill
armored knights from an unmanly and impersonal distance. That also was
bad for the social order. Welsh bowmen faced no such opprobrium although
their arrows killed far more mounted knights.

Jump ahead almost a millennium. There is debate on what is
a chemical weapon and not all gasses — think tear gas — are poisonous.
Poison gas was used infrequently but without sanction during the past
100 years.

Germans and the British gassed each other during World War
I. Communists were accused of using poison gas during Russian Civil
War. Italians gassed native troops in Ethiopia in the 1930s in years
when colonial powers were suspected/accused of gassing rebellious native
troops. Japanese gassed Chinese during early World War II. Egyptians
gassed Yemeni forces in the 1960s but Americans denied using
toxic/blister gasses in Vietnam and Laos. Iraq deployed lethal gas
against its own people and Iranian forces in the insane Iraq-Iran 1980s
war. Politicians and UN officials fulminate against gassing civilians
but they only remind us how selective agony and journalism can be.

• No less authority than President Obama relegated the
comparative to the dustbin of grammar. His speech at the Lincoln
Memorial last week praised King and other civil rights activists, saying
“Because they marched, America became more free and more fair.” True,
but I’ll bet King would have said, “freer and fairer.”

• Everyone’s lauding David Frost’s evocative interviews
with disgraced Richard Nixon after he resigned the presidency. He died
after a heart attack on Saturday.

My memory of Frost is different: TW3, the original That
Was the Week that Was on BBC TV. It was as irreverent as posh Brits from
Oxbridge could be and Frost was a central figure in its creation in
1962 and weekly broadcasts until it was cancelled to avoid criticism as
the 1964 general election neared. Two skits stand out in my memory, in
part because my Saturday night duties at UPI included watching and
filing a story on anything newsworthy that TW3 did/said.

The first showed an otherwise empty set with seemingly
naked Millicent Martin, then young and drop-dead lovely, astride and
leaning over the back of a curvy, modern Arne Jacobsen chair. It was the
same pose call girl Christine Keeler used when photographed during the
scandal over her affair with government minister John Profumo. You can
see the original Keeler image at www.vam.ac.uk. Martin
resembled Keeler just as Tina Fey looked like Sarah Palin. Martin
looked straight at the camera and said something like, “John told me I
was sitting on a fortune.” That was it. Perfect lampoon but there was no
way to use that skit on UPI’s wire.

The second memorable skit followed the apparent TW3 and
BBC late night sign-off. A De Gaulle look alike, right down the uniform
and kepi on his head, addressed the Brits contemptuously over some
strategic or diplomatic blunder. Then the broadcast ended. That skit
was newsworthy. BBC said its switchboard operators — remember, this was
the early 1960s — were overwhelmed. Seemed the perfect jab at the
Establishment by its children fooled a lot of Brits; they thought BBC
really had broadcast a De Gaulle speech.

• On a celebratory note, authorities dropped charges
against Tim Funk, religion reporter for the Charlotte Observer, who
arrested while he interviewed “Moral Monday” demonstrators at the
Statehouse in Raleigh, NC. He was charged with second-degree trespass
and failure to disperse.

Tim’s a Northern Kentuckian and among the ablest of
decades of my undergraduate students. After the local prosecutor came to
his senses, Tim told the AP, “It was clear to everyone there that I was
a news reporter just doing my job interviewing Charlotte-area clergy
about how they felt about being arrested. The reporter’s job is to be
the eyes and ears of the public who can’t be present at important public
events like this protest. That’s all I was doing.”

When his June 10 arrest was reported, at least one
respondent noted that Tim was among the first detained, stopping him
from seeing how police handled demonstrators.

His editor, Rick Thames, told AP, “This is clearly the
right result, and we congratulate the district attorney for making the
right decision. Tim Funk was working as a journalist inside the most
obvious public building in our state. The videotape of Tim’s arrest
demonstrates clearly that his only purpose in being there was to provide
our readers a vivid firsthand account. He was clearly not obstructing
the police. It’s hard to understand why he was arrested in the first
place.”

• Cincinnati taxpayers need to know more about competing —
and inescapably costly — plans to overcome years of city council
shortchanging the city pension fund. The news isn’t good. As the
Enquirer’s James Pilcher put it Sunday, “if every man,woman and child
living in the city of Cincinnati contributed $2,000 apiece, it still
wouldn’t be enough to fill the plan’s current $870 million gap.”

There’s a timeline with his explanatory story that screams
for elaboration: What, if any, roles did mayoral candidates Roxanne
Qualls and John Cranley play in council decisions to deepen the pension
debt?

And I howled at the quote from state auditor Dave Yost: “ .
. . the city is in a fork in the road . . . And I’m concerned
Cincinnati is not doing enough to avoid going down that fork in the
road.”

Don’t try this at home. Sort of like standing with a foot
on each side of a barbed wire fence. Reminds me of a friend who’d look
right, point left and say, “Go this way.”

Maybe with Yost’s sense of direction, Cincinnati should consider the road not taken.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yesterday popped in on a local pro-Issue 2 and Issue 3 call center and then refused to publicly endorse either Republican initiative. “Yes” votes on Issues 2 and 3 would keep Senate Bill 5 and allow Ohioans to opt out of mandatory health care passed by Congress last year, respectively. From CNN:

"I am not speaking about the particular ballot issues," Romney said, only after repeated questions from reporters. "Those are up to the people of Ohio. But I certainly support the efforts of the governor to reign in the scale of government. I am not terribly familiar with the two ballot initiatives. But I am certainly supportive of the Republican Party's efforts here."

Both topics are tricky for the Romney campaign.

He is no stranger to health insurance mandates, having passed one of his own in 2006 while governor of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the Republican-backed union legislation remains deeply unpopular in the state, which is all but certain to be a swing state once again in 2012.

Hamilton County commissioners will vote on levies today. If commissioners do not increase the money levies generate, mental health services could be severely cut in Hamilton County. On Aug. 1, Thomas Gableman, Mental Health and Recovery Services Board Chairman, told the commissioners, “I cannot tell you we can do more with less. We cannot do the same with less. We will do less with less.”

Republicans, including local state representative candidate Mike Wilson, have been pushing false information regarding a lawsuit filed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party to restore early voting. After releasing a misleading press release, Wilson clarified his position to CityBeat. Politifact rated Mitt Romney’s accusations “False.”

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is calling for new regulations on internet cafes. Internet cafes have been taking advantage of legal loopholes to hold contests, according to a press release from DeWine’s offices.

Ohio could finish the 2013 fiscal year with a $408 million surplus. The surplus could give more ground to Gov. John Kasich’s call for an income tax cut.

The swine flu outbreak in Ohio is being watched carefully by CDC officials. The CDC is worried the virus could mutate, making it deadlier or more contagious.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has a big announcement about elections tomorrow.

One reason for high health-care costs may be the fee-for-service model. The model encourages doctors to provide as many medical procedures as possible, even when they might not be necessary.